A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, May 5, 2025

End of the Road (Aram Avakian, 1970)

James Earl Jones and Stacey Keach in End of the Road

Cast: Stacey Keach, Harris Yulin, Dorothy Tristan, James Earl Jones, Grayson Hall, Ray Brock, John Pleshette, Gail Gilmore. Screenplay: Dennis McGuire, Terry Southern, Aram Avakian, based on a novel by John Barth. Cinematography: Gordon Willis. Production design: Jack Wright III. Film editing: Robert Q. Lovett. Music: Teo Macero. 

Tonally and narratively chaotic from the outset, Aram Avakian's End of the Road finally settles into a straightforward plot line before its nihilistic ending. It earned an X rating for a truly harrowing abortion scene (and perhaps also for a scene in which a naked man tries to copulate with a chicken), but it's no skin flick. Instead it's a fable about ... oh, maybe about the malaise of life in the middle of the twentieth century, to judge from the montage of scenes from the era spanning Adolf Hitler to Richard Nixon. If it needs to be seen for anything it's for the astonishing and out-of-character performance by James Earl Jones as a psychiatrist who runs a very unconventional mental institution. Otherwise, it's a movie to be endured more than to be savored. 

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